Finding and organizing your digital photos

[Froosh]

All,

Since I bought my G3 last April I have taken many, many photos. How do you more experienced photographers find and organize your digital photos?

Do you use software like Microsoft Access to build an image database or do you use ”albumprograms” like Adobe Photoshop Album? Other solutions?

And I don’t want to lose my many photos. Do you store your photos on CD’s and/or do you use big harddisks? My harddisk crashed yesterday, but I think (I’m not sure) I had copied most of my photos earlier on CD’s.

Thank you for any reply.

[jglisson73]

I started using Photoshop Album and LOVE IT! It makes it really easy to organize your photos and keep track of them.

As for backing them up, I suppose that burning them to CD is a decent way, however 700mb of photos isn't really that many! DVD/R would be nice...

John

[John_T]

I thought I had lost almost all my digital photos a couple of weeks ago when after a clean XP install on the C: drive, I could no longer access my D: drive. Imagine!

It was only after a week of horror that I found that Norton GoBack had changed the master boot record of that drive and after using a utility I got it back. Wheew!

I went directly out and bought a Maxtor USB2/Firewire 160GB external hard disk, did a complete back up on it and do its one button backup whenever I think about it.

No backup medium is permanent or foolproof. The only good system for backing up is one that you'll do. Just like charging my mouse, it's one of those things that I easily forget, but there is nothing like a good scare to get me back on the straight and narrow!

[ravens]

Does Photoshop Album also display the EXIF information? Does it allow you to tag a picture into 2 different databses? If not, does anyone know of a database that shows that info and also allows you to tag one picture to 2 different databases?

Sorry for the 'pile on' questions, but I am quickly realizing I am taking a ton more pictures and need to get organized. I would also like to learn for my experince and seeing the camera data would be helpful.

Thanks!
Paul

[jglisson73]

Photoshop Album does display the EXIF info for your files. And yes, you can put multiple tags on the same file.

Album will also create web galleries for you which is nice if you host your own website like I do instead of using pbase or something like that.

John

[John_T]

Photoshop Elements 2 does a pretty good organizing job too, and includes Create Web Photo Gallery. It doesn't do everything, but it is very useful for everyday stuff at a decent price. Mine was free, bundled with one of the Canon products below.

[ravens]

Very cool!
Thanks for the information--this forum is the best!
Paul

[JamesC]

Other image management packages you might like to consider are:

Thumbs Plus! http://www.cerious.com/
Extensis http://www.extensis.com/portfolio/
IMatch http://www.photools.com/

I haven't any personal experience of these as I'm still deciding which one to go for! IMatch looks like the best trade off between price/performance, but it's only available for PC.

Meanwhile, I just try to be obsessive about renaming my pictures as something meaningful, rather than leaving them with the file numbers generated by the camera. I also organise them rigorously into folders for each month, with sub-folders for big events where I took lots of pix. My mother's a librarian, perhaps it's in the genes...

Happy filing!
James Carter

[jglisson73]

Oh, by the way, you can download photoshop album starter edition for free from adobe.com. It will manage 250 images.

John

[psk4363]

I've tried several cataloguing programs including Album and can not find any to beat ACDSee 5 Powerpack - check their web site, www.acdsystems.com, and download their demo version.

Barry

[dnadalin]

Microsoft Digital Image Pro Suite. Version 9.

Looks like a pretty decent library.
It supposed to let's you archive to CDs and remember which CD you archived to. You just find the thumbnail and it tells you which CD to go get.
You can also add keynames to pictures to search by and rate the pictures. View by keywords, dates or rating.
Or so I've been told...

I plan to order it. We'll see how it does.
I have Digital Image Pro version 7, I can use Photoshop plugins with it. I find I am using Photoshop less and less...

Just My Opinion. Your's might differ...

[lsippell]

psk4363 wrote:
I've tried several cataloguing programs including Album and can not find any to beat ACDSee 5 Powerpack - check their web site, www.acdsystems.com, and download their demo version.

Barry


I agree with you. After trying 4 or 5 others at the same time as ACDC, I bought ACDC.
Louis

[nsxpower]

I use iView Media Pro, which IMHO is probably one of the best solutions out there. Its $50, fast, reliable and has all the features and cutomizations you would need. Supports Canon RAW too!!! It take 5 seconds to load a 10Gb library on my PowerBook!

I've tried Extensis Portfolio, which is a great program but is overkill for amateur photographers and lack a lot of the features of iView actually.

Give it a try.

[Froosh]

The replays to this topic have been very useful. I have so far tested Adobe Photoshop Album, but I find it a bit stiff-legged because by default, four tag categories are available: People, Places, Events, and Other. To customize the catalog for my own needs I have to add subcategories. I would prefer to build the tag categories directly customized for my needs. It seems a bit mucky having to crawle down to subcategories each time I want to add a tag to a photo.

I’ll test Adobe Photoshop Album a bit more before I make a final conclusion and I’ll also test two other programs mentioned, ACDSee 5 Powerpack and iView Media Pro. The results will be published here.

I agree with JamesC, that it seems practical to organize the photos rigorously into folders for each month, but it shouldn’t be necessary to create sub-folders for each event. The album programme will handle this issue.

File numbers generated by the camera, that JamesC also mentioned, can easily be batch renamed by date and number for instance 030710_001.JPG for the first photo taken the 10. July 2003. I use Breezebrowser to do this task, but maybe ZoomBrowser has this feature too.

Once you have a folder for each month (sorted by shooting date, not by event) it’s easy to take backup to CD’s and easy to find the right CD later if necessary.

[Chris1le]

I'm new here. But I've been using CompuPic by Photodex for a number of years. I've tried Photoshop Album and found it to be slow and kind of clunky. CompuPic alows you to view your pictures somewhat like the File Browser in Photoshop Elements only faster. Just my two cents.